By: Claire Kenneally

Billions for Borders 

On July 1st, 2025, the U.S. Senate passed a budget reconciliation bill (“H.R.1” or “One Big Beautiful Bill”), allegedly aimed at fixing a broken immigration system. Over $170 billion was allocated for immigration and border-enforcement projects, with $46.5 billion for border wall construction, $45 billion for private prison corporations to expand detention centers, and $29.9 billion for hiring additional ICE agents and funding deportations. 

Critics of the bill denounce its punitive emphasis on incarceration and deportation instead of pathways to legal citizenship. American Immigration Council policy director Nayna Gupta observed that “[the bill] does nothing to address the real problems in our immigration system including court backlogs, a lack of legal pathways to citizenship, and a broken U.S. asylum system.”

The Paper Wall We Aren’t Talking About

Despite more money than ever pouring into the immigration system, pathways to legal citizenship, asylum, and work permits have only gotten more convoluted and backlogged in the last 20 years. 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is the federal agency that processes visa and green card applications. USCIS is distinct from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CPB). Money allocated to ICE and border enforcement does not trickle down to,  nor support USCIS. USCIS is primarily funded through user fees paid by those applying for immigration and naturalization benefits. 

Figure 1: The Complex Green Card Application System

In 2023, USCIS processed over 10 million applications. However, they are still taking longer than ever to review applications, and are currently grappling with an unprecedented 11.3 million pending applications. As backlogs grow, applicants are left waiting for months, years, and sometimes decades longer than they should. 

Part of this gridlock is the outdated use of paper applications and limited e-filing options. “Notorious for its reliance on antiquated paper files,” USCIS requires immigrants (and their lawyers) to embark upon a lengthy process of preparing and mailing printed application materials to one of only five national processing centers.

This summer, I had the privilege of working as a legal intern at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. There, I observed staff attorneys spend hours compiling application materials for clients—writing extensive cover letters listing every document in the application, triple-checking that even blank or non-applicable boxes were marked, photocopying birth certificates multiple times to ensure clarity, and assembling a FedEx or USPS package for delivery. Then they’d carefully attach the package’s tracking number to the client’s file, so that in the (not unlikely) chance USCIS claimed they never received it or it was delayed, they could verify the application had been delivered. Then they waited, sometimes for weeks, to receive a confirmation letter from USCIS. Weeks and months after that, they might receive another letter asking for a clarification, different information, or a copy of a different form. 

Technical issues also persist beyond the application stage, slowing progress and creating confusion throughout the process. Checking a case’s status on USCIS’s website is also often futile due to system outages, server issues, or glitches. In early 2025, a USCIS website glitch falsely showed that hundreds of cases had been advanced to final review, leading to widespread confusion and disappointment when the error was rectified. 

How can this be? How can we have systems in place for online tax filing, online banking, and countless other e-filing systems, yet USCIS can’t manage to move beyond manually reviewing millions of paper forms? And how can billions of taxpayer dollars be allocated to immigration reform, yet so focused on inhumane incarceration practices instead of obvious improvements that create legal pathways to citizenship? 

A History of Inefficiency

Interestingly, the inefficiency of USCIS technology has long been a thorn in the side of effective immigration processes. In a 2005 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, auditors noted that “USCIS’ IT environment for processing immigration benefits continues to be inefficient, hindering its ability to carry out its mission. USCIS’ processes are primarily manual, paper-based, and duplicative, resulting in an ineffective use of human and financial resources to ship, store, and track immigration files.” 

Similar sentiments repeated in 2014 and 2016, with auditors writing that “USCIS struggled to modernize its stove- piped, paper-based immigration benefits processing to a more centralized and automated environment”. In 2020, yet another audit found that despite “strategic planning activities to help prioritize legacy IT systems or infrastructure for modernization… [the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS] continues to rely on deficient and outdated IT systems to perform mission-critical operations.” 

The Human Cost 

There are multiple implications when a system designed to support some of our most vulnerable community members struggles to be efficient. It is costly. It creates backlogs, currently in the millions. It is frustrating for USCIS staff and immigration attorneys who must carefully wade through inch-thick application materials. But most importantly, it is cruel to the millions of immigrants a year attempting to enter the United States. Some will wait decades just to be denied. Others will wait for months with no updates, only to receive a cryptic notice warning that their case may be denied unless they locate and resend documents they thought were already submitted. 

Low-income applicants in particular face heightened barriers due to paper-only fee-waiver applications, while H.R.1 has simultaneously hiked filing fees by hundreds of percent. With billions of dollars allocated for immigration reform through H.R.1 and millions of dollars in profits lining the pockets of privatized prison corporations as a result, this process is a slap in the face to those attempting to immigrate through legally recognized channels. 

Now what? 

Ironically, the very inefficiency of immigration technology has proven to be an effective tool for limiting access to the United States. As of October 2025, just seventeen of the 103 forms on USCIS’s website were available to be completed online. Discussing USCIS’s all-time high backlog of applications, immigration attorney Greg Siskind told Newsweek: “USCIS is still moving along with e-filing…and [their] long-term goal is to totally move away from paper filings…[even] more worrisome is the expectation by many in the immigration bar that USCIS will increasingly use AI—often poorly designed AI—that will speed up decision-making but in a way that lacks transparency and with serious quality control concerns.”

USCIS’ paper-heavy infrastructure continues to frustrate applicants and attorneys alike, with digital access limited to a fraction of its forms. Whispers of utilizing AI introduces a worrisome paradox: how can we trust advanced technology to improve outcomes when the fundamentals of digital access and e-filing are still missing? 

I believe immigration reform is possible—but only if we stop funneling billions of dollars into cages, and start prioritizing accessibility.

#WJLTA #ImmigrationTechCrisis